He states:
"rather than being more than usually nuanced insights into sex roles and gender behavior, as one would hope to have from a narrator who's so pointedly identified with Teiresias, the characterization of boys as inherently oversexed and violence-loving—traits that Callie, as she becomes a teenager, finds she shares, and that appear meant to justify her feeling that she is "really" a boy—are hardly nuanced. (They're the product of what you could safely call cultural monovision.) And to declare that "desire [for a girl] made me cross over to the other side"—i.e., to being a boy—seems awfully naive in this day and age, positing a kind of essentialism about sexuality and erotic affect that is equally unsubtle. (Why is it the case that Callie's attraction to girls "means" she's a boy? Couldn't she simply be gay?) We may not know much about Callie by the end of this book, but we certainly get a glimpse into how Eugenides thinks. "Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level," the adult Cal boasts, a claim that will surely come as a surprise to Eugenides's (presumably testosterone-rich) gay male readership.
I suspect that Eugenides has fallen back on such unthinking clichés for the same reason that Callie and Cal remain so unformed: in the end, he hasn't figured out what might go on inside the head of someone who's had Callie's experiences. This vacuum at the center of his book accounts for a general sense of deflation toward the end, when some weighty climactic aperçus start racking up. But do you really read a 529-page novel that sets out to explore the most profound realm of human experience merely to find out, in its closing pages, that "normality wasn't normal" or that "what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death"?"
So what makes this reviewer so angry? That an intersexed person's experience with gender has to be a sideshow? That it has to be agony? That Eugenides has to dwell on Cal's experiences of being intersexed while the people around him are what shaped him is what I think matters.
Ok... this made more sense in my head. I think its the hang over stopping it from being good. More later.
1 comment:
"the people around him are what shaped him" I totally agree. I was actually thinking about how this book is toted as being a icon of queer reading. While it is definitely queer, in so many senses. I think a lot of it is about family and where you come from and history and friendship and adolescence. Which I guess all come down to the human experience.
Okay. So I just read the whole review. I agree to a certain point with Mendelsohn, the critic. He makes some good points. But I still stand by what I said before.
One thing that really bothered me about his review is that he (Mendelsohn) assumes that Callie/Cal is this all knowing creature that has been fully educated on gender, sexuality, intersexedness (is that even a word?). Mendelsohn talks about "cultural monovision" that Callie/Cal and Eugenides seem to possess. Of course Callie/Cal would look at her/his situation with certain blinders, she's/he's just a kid. Also even as an adult not everyone knows about queer culture and politics. We can't all be SO enlightened so why would we expect a thirteen-year-old to be?
Mendelsohn did make a good point about the two stories: Greek and Intersexed. They do seem a little separated. And it does seem at points that Eugenides did want to write a book about a Greek family and decided to throw in the subject of Intersexedness.
I also want to talk about this quote from the review:
"The result is an odd but pervasive sense of superficiality; it's a performance more than a novel. Toward the end of Middlesex, Callie starts doing some research on terms she sees in a doctor's report about her, and (after looking up some words in an encyclopedia) notes, with grief, that one synonym for what she is is "MONSTER." The scene is meant to be moving—climactically moving, even—but it doesn't work because you've never really gotten to know this monster intimately; you know about her what you might have guessed anyway—and we don't need novels to tell us what we already know. (The scrim of the narrator's sardonic, postmodern sensibility, while fashionable among writers in their forties, doesn't help matters.) The scene may put you in mind of another famous monster, but only briefly; Mary Shelley was canny enough to know that in order to sympathize with her creature, you had to get inside its head, let it speak for itself."
I understand that Mendelsohn is trying to make a point that Eugenides doesn't delve into the character that Callie/Cal really is, but that part that really rips me about this quote is that Callie/Cal ISN'T A MONSTER. That's the whole fucking point. Asshole. A monster is "an imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly, and frightening or an inhumanly cruel or wicked person."
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